Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is a powerful tool for assessing and investigating the interior of living systems without ionizing radiation. Being already widely applied in medicine and biomedical research, it is also subject to dynamic research activities. Magnetic resonance methods can be used to measure a plethora of parameters characterizing the structure, status, and function of biological tissues, such as water content, concentration of metabolites, temperature, microscopic structure, pH, diffusion coefficients, status of blood perfusion, etc.

Our main research focus is diffusion-weighted MR imaging, which aims at measuring the diffusion-related motion of water molecules in living tissue as a means of assessing tissue structure. This already plays a key role in clinical diagnostics of stroke where it is used to detect cell swelling. A number of approaches for measuring different characteristics of microscopic tissue structure have been proposed and require investigation.